Creativity in Education

Creative Thinking Skills

Creative Thinking Skills make space for processing information within the mind and externally. How we learn is at least, if not more important than what we learn. After all, everything is on the internet, right? How to filter, evaluate and understand information in ways that are natural and resonate more readily comes through Creative Thinking Skills. And what comes from that? Original Thought.
A mind map just one example of divergent, natural, open ended thinking that reflects associative learning. Creativty is essential or 21st century education. Integrate Creative Thinking into education and classrooms come alive with curiosity. And curious students want to learn.

Visual Literacy

Drawing for learning. Level set and build a new classroom community where equality, inclusivity and respect come together and create a bedrock for collaborative learning. Student artwork forms the platform through with the curriculum emerges. Resonate with students by allowing their world to set the stage for shared new understanding and perspective taking. Flip the classroom. We have so much to learn from each other. And with new connections, its all so much more interesting. Collaboration makes for stronger Communication. Creative Process in the classroom is where its at. It’s fun. It’s dynamic. It’s powerful.

Somatic Practice for Learning

Learning language is tough. Learning concepts, even tougher. An embodied practice for learning abstract concepts literally embodies language for deeper learning. Students in Madagascar learn creative process through living pictures for playful learning and understanding. This practice occurs for the introduction of every new concept in the creative problem solving process.

Move for learning. A human endeavor that reflects a root cause may be a bit dramatic. It makes the point though in ways that can resonate for life. It’s sort of like we know it because we feel it.

Creative Curricula
Research-based,
dynamic, fun 21st century ed

Like all languages, the language of creativity can be learned. It should be taught. When practiced, creative thinking can pass into subconsciousness for a new fluency in imaginative thinking.

Creativity Though Arts is a Visual Literacy curriculum designed to expand curricula and accelerate creative thinking skills. This curriculum is rooted in the Torrance Incubation Model (TIM) for Teaching and Learning. Creative Thinking Skils were designed to combine with other subjects, any subject actually. True to the TIM model, Creativity Through Arts combines creativity with arts as a second subject for an experiential course in the development of creative thinking skills.

Creativity Through Arts came about to instigate fun and positive action during fully remote classes brought on by COVID-19. The curriculum became a final project in the completion of an MS Applied Imagination in 2021. Students learned creative thinking through art-making and practiced art making as the application of creative thinking tools. To boil it down, creativity and content go hand in hand and belong together from the creative education perspecitve. Creativity Through Arts leans into the familiar, that ‘creativity is for artists’ as the starting point to teach creative thinking.

What students learn:

Visual Communication - exposure to great artworks
Visual Thinking - referred by Torrance as Creative Thinking Skills (information processing)
Visual Learning meaning making of Creative Thinking Skill through art making
The application of creative thinking to learning generally and to life
Formulation of original thought

How students learn to develop creative thinking

Play, collaborative and individual activities, drawing, graphic organizing, arts and reflection.
Combine traditional curricula with Creative Thinking Skills
Students record their learning in handwritten book form.
Coursework culminates in a creative product, a Bookfolio

Bullet journal, meet the classroom. Bookfolio is an intersectional concept. Students develop creative fluency through drawing, writing, intuitive and deliberate thinking in these paper bound sandboxes throughout their course work.

Because each student composes their own Bookfolio, students become connected and engaged in their work. Having a dedicated space for learning elevates the significance of the learning. Pride kicks in to what becomes a self-crafted creative product. Bookfolios complement creativity coursework.

How many people want to write a book?
How many do?

Bookfolios are beyond a keepsake. Bookfolios naturally become personalized student reference books and testament of engagement with the self and coursework in creativity. By the end of the course, students can put their own self-written Bookfolios on the shelf alongside other great works.

Creativity Training
Aligning Creative Thinking Skills with content for 21st century pedagogy.

Creative thinking can and should be combined with any subject. As our our super power, what happens when we bring creative thinking into learning?

Possiblities emerge.

Choises, options and new information that, together with skills to filter, evaluate and develop original thought opens up all kinds of possibility.

Teacher Training for Creativity
International Friends School, Bellevevue, WA, 4.2022

Creativity Through English
Wings of Change, Nosy Be, Madagascar 5.2021 - present

Micro Creativity Lessons
Ella Baker Elementary, Redmond WA, USA, 2020